This blog flew past 1,024 pages, and I didn’t even notice. At ten posts per page, that means there are now more than 10,240 posts, or about a quarter of a J-Walk Blog . Some posts are even good. I’d better install PAE onto Hugo, or it won’t be able to address any new posts. AAAAAAH! I like to remind people I’m funny, or they’d forget. See also Dragonfly BSD The Wikipedia article on beans By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-03-25. This blog flew past 1,024 pages, an...

SEGOVIA, Spain (March 24, 2026) – Shield AI and Destinus announced today the successful completion of a rapid autonomy integration campaign on the Destinus Hornet platform. The flight tests, conducted in Segovia, Spain, validated the integration of Shield AI’s Hivemind autonomy software with the Hornet flight control architecture after a two-month integration effort. During the campaign, Hivemind autonomously adapted the platform’s flight paths in real time, dynamically updating routing...

You’ve got to think about big things while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction. — Alvin Toffler A rule (or boundary) turns a theoretical or philosophical stance into a clearly defined behavior: Do this , and your behaviors align with your belief. Congruence.  Do that , and you miss it. Conflict.  Internal conflict doesn't feel good. Break dumb rules . Break arbitrary small rules (or don’t). Break rules that exist only t...

TL;DR; I converted Python Bytes from Quart/Flask to the Rust-backed Robyn framework and benchmarked it with Locust . There was no meaningful speed or memory improvement - and Robyn actually used more memory. Framework maturity, ecosystem depth, and app server flexibility still matter more than raw benchmark numbers. Last week I played with the idea of replacing Quart (async Flask ) with Robyn for our bigger web apps. Robyn is built almost entirely in Rust, and in the benchmarks, ...

I love the storytelling work that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York does. For example, the Frame of Mind podcast highlights short stories of people’s relationships with museums – around fifteen minutes long each. It is a great listen. Last year, I watched a video by The Met on their YouTube channel as part of their “Meet Me at the Met” series. The video was an interview with Orhan Pamuk , a Nobel Prize-winning author. The video has stuck with me ever since. When I think about...

Left: Model of the ‘Lanyue’ lunar lander stacked on top of its propulsion module; Right: Diagram of the propulsion system of the lander. Images: Shujianyang / SAST / CASC The Chinese-language research journal “Chinese Space Science and Technology” has published a special issue on the development of various elements of China’s crewed Moon missions with 14 ‘open access’ papers. This includes details of the ~26,000-kilogram crewed lunar landing system called ‘Lanyue’,...

Whenever I stay still, I feel the spiders weave their webs around me. Their tiny legs entangle me in silk, traverse my body as they seem to proudly inspect their work and into darkness sink. There're times I see the spiders' threads on others, They shimmer gently in the purple dusk, Or sway with zephyrs in the hair of lovers, stuck. To listen to the webs is to hear echoes of social butterflies ensnared within arachnid galleries of human ethos, whose pieces come and go ...

Trees take quite a while to grow. If someone 50 years ago planted a row of oaks or a chestnut tree on your plot of land, you have something that no amount of money or effort can replicate. The only way is to wait. Tree-lined roads, old gardens, houses sheltered by decades of canopy: if you want to start fresh on an empty plot, you will not be able to get that. Because some things just take time. We know this intuitively. We pay premiums for Swiss watches, Hermès bags and old properties ...

After learning Apple killed off FireWire (IEEE 1394) support in macOS 26 Tahoe , I started looking at alternatives for old FireWire equipment like hard drives, DV cameras, and A/V gear. I own an old Canon GL1 camera, with a 'DV' port. I could plug that into an old Mac (like the dual G4 MDD above) with FireWire—or even a modern Mac running macOS < 26, with some dongles —and transfer digital video footage between the camera and an application like Final Cut Pro. After learning Apple ...

High table dinner at Magdalen My time in Oxford has come to an end and I head back to Chicago this week. I was a visiting Fellow at Magdalen (pronounced "maudlin") College for the Hilary Term. There's a six week break between the eight-week Hilary and Trinity terms. They work the fellows hard during the terms with teaching, tutoring, admissions, hiring and various other administrative functions. All the events, seminars, workshops, high-table dinners are scheduled during the term. Pretty much no...

Everyone in academia is trying to figure out what to do about AI. I don’t have a general answer, but I do have a proposal for dealing with the flood of AI slop in research publishing. My idea is built on several observations: Credit cards became popular in the US twenty years before they took off in Europe. The reason is that Senator William Proxmire pushed through legislation in 1975 that put 100% of the cost of fraud on the credit card companies themselves. His argument was...

Over the weekend, I had some interesting discussions about the impacts AI on developer growth and skill atrophy. Much of that discussion was inspired by Mo Bitar's video on the subject. Within my small group, we couldn't come to a consensus on its impacts. We all had anecdotes with wildly different outcomes, so I decided to push a poll on a few communities I participate in to get a better sense of how engineers feel about AI's impact on their learning. By the time time I collected and processed ...

We don’t want to test gRPC or an HTTP server itself, we simply want to test our method’s logic. The simple answer to this question is to de-couple gRPC’s work from the actual work. – John Doak, Testing gRPC methods That advice is right most of the time. If your handler is a thin shell over business logic that lives behind an interface, you can test the logic without gRPC at all. Inject a fake , call the method, check the result. But sometimes you do need to test the gRPC layer. ...

Blooket login gives students and teachers access to their accounts at id.blooket.com . From there, you can host games, track progress, and manage question sets. This guide covers every sign-in method, account setup, and what to do when the login stops working. How to Log In to Blooket The standard Blooket login takes about 30 seconds. Go to blooket.com , click Login at the top right, and enter your credentials. 1 Go to id.blooket.com/login 2 Enter your email address and password...

So it turns out I didn't like the mustard yellow and steel blue design that I created a couple weeks ago. It just didn't sit well with me, and if I look back over my design history the designs that have stuck over the years are invariably grey with a splash of colour. Problem was, I didn't really know how I was going to redesign the site. Then, one day, I was talking with Sven via email and I visited his blog (also running Pure Blog for the record 🎉), and I immediately knew that was...

Modern processors have the ability to execute many instructions per cycle, on a single core. To be able to execute many instructions per cycle in practice, processors predict branches. I have made the point over the years that modern CPUs have an incredible ability to predict branches . It makes benchmarking difficult because if you test on small datasets, you can get surprising results that might not work on real data. My go-to benchmark is a function like so: while (howmany != 0) { ...

An Architecture Decision Record (ADR) is a short document that captures and explains a single decision relevant to a product or ecosystem. Documents should be short, just a couple of pages, and contain the decision, the context for making it, and significant ramifications. They should not be modified if the decision is changed, but linked to a superseding decision. As with most written documents, writing ADRs serves two purposes. Firstly they act as a record of decisions, allowing p...

After considerable effort and time, I think it's time to talk about some challenges the IT community faces over AI adoption. This entire article represents my thoughts and opinions only. Most AI adoption frameworks are targeted at the C-suite, and if you're a consulting company you likely want to target decision makers, and not IT. If you're a tooling company or AI provider, you talk up the org chart selling your product. I'll go into depth here talking across the org to fellow practitioner...

We love generative testing in the world of query languages, because languages in general are in a lot of ways, too complex to test by hand. There's an exponential number of combinations of features that could be involved in any given query. Database query optimizers do a lot of work to detect when those features are used together in ways that permit better execution. This is great, and important, especially when queries are generated by the composition of various tools that might not be aware of...

Hello. I'm hosting a writing contest with my friends at Quarter Mile . Please send us something! Don't overthink it -- they're just aliens, and you're only human. Hello. I'm hosting a writing contest with my friends at Quarter Mile . Please send us something! Don't overthink it -- they're just aliens, and you're only human. Hello. I'm hosting a writing contest with my friends at Quarter Mile . Please send us something! Don't overthink it -- they're just aliens, and you're only ...

Starlette 1.0 is out ! This is a really big deal. I think Starlette may be the Python framework with the most usage compared to its relatively low brand recognition because Starlette is the foundation of FastAPI , which has attracted a huge amount of buzz that seems to have overshadowed Starlette itself. Kim Christie started working on Starlette in 2018 and it quickly became my favorite out of the new breed of Python ASGI frameworks. The only reason I didn't use it as the basis for my own Da...

Cargo ship Marine Angel navigating the Chicago River in 1953. Via History Calendar . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week: damage to the Ras Laffan LNG facility, housing bubble risks, North Korea’s naval production, Bezos’ $100 billion for manufacturing automation, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. War in Iran Ras Laffa...

Following the 7-step approach and the 1-step approach , and also channelling the spirit of the longstanding tradition of learning how to draw owls on the internet : Think about a subject and then start typing Type the rest of the fucking post and then hit publish Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to Peo...